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Accumulations

Support — WordPress.com, offiline until tomorrow, has nothing on the «cheatin’ uh?» error message that continues to bar access to my PT-Br blog. This, according to the error message,

for a violation of our Terms of Service.

I am still able to use the «Press This» shortcut to cut and paste a fair-use amount of text from a URL I want to comment in English.

Invoking my spirit animal the same way, the same mechanism is applied to an original mockup of the Bicho-Preguiça — the three-toed tree sloth — blog, above, which now appears instead of the blocked version.

I find myself polishing my Portuguese more often than I do attempting to English the complicated reality of Sambodia, which is not in Kansas by any means.

The so-called “experts” NPR interviews are pro-government, pro-war, and promote the ideas of right-wing think tanks. A faction of former national security advisors, defense department officials, ambassadors, ex-pentagon generals, and military commanders.

Inside the DC beltway.

The government to K-street, to think tank, to NPR pipeline.

I would head the list with private sector experience, or at least insert it at some strategic crossroads in this career trajectory. Astonishing, the number of boards the developers of Facebook and Twitter, and their employees, are on.

Those are the opinions and views heard in the vast majority of stories.

I know because after stories air, I google the website the expert represents.

Having observed the phenomenon for years, however,I think the process is more nuanced and insidious than that, although its Manicheanism — there exists no third, much less a fourth — remains its most blatant flaw.

The result is public-interest programming surrendered to the oblique strategies but massively funded 21st-century zaibatsus such as Microsoft-Gates Foundation.

Anyway, I thought to mention this point because the local public broadcaster here, TV Cultura, has just admitted programming by Grupo Abril and the Folha de S. Paulo to its grid, kicking off a familiar row over alleged infringement of the broadcaster’s public mission.

Accusations fly from all sides in a media environment rife with examples of the so-called «electronic caudillism», such as the Parana governor who railed against press critics on a local educational channel.